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What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel

thewinnower.com

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181–190 of 195 posts

Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel

#181

Post by jimhefferon »

I know this isn't the point of the article, but surely if you were a time traveller you wouldn't bet on the stock market and risk being found out or have your cash confiscated? Surely you'd research a financial instrument that has existed for a long time before your now and go back and make a modest investment in it.

You could do a number of things that are more subtle to establish ways for the investment to not be noticed, by moving the money around, etc., but I expect that your main concern would be how to fly under the radar while compounding works.

In fact, perhaps people in the time-travellers world who want to invest into their future would be chiefly concerned that time travellers in their future are coming back and dominating all the investments without ever plowing the proceeds back into their present ..

Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel

#182

Post by bbwharris »

gb wrote: post #7

Perhaps no evidence was found because people from the future have seen this paper and therefore know not to reveal themselves this way!

Furthermore, simply the act of publishing this paper likely caused our time line to shift to a point where future travelers are privvy to automated methods to detect their presence in the past.

Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel

#183

Post by grkvlt »

jckt wrote: post #165
neurobro wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. Or maybe your wording was intentional, politically motivated, and equally as out-of-place as the attention it predictably draws.

I feel bad derailing this thread further, but you know bloody nothing about me. My comment was on-topic. grkvlt's was not, regardless of what he thinks I meant with that one pronoun (which was wrong, anyway). Maybe you should realise that sane women, just as much as sane men, don't think pronouns will "solve" sexism. If I'm referring to a specific person, I'll be specific. If it's some random imaginary person, it's n…

Sure, but if I were to strip away the inflammatory comments, I'd still be left with the question of why you chose to assume the journal editor was female. Since this is unusual in the physics world, it sort of looks like you have an agenda. Therefore, it would have been more helpful to use gender neutral language, rather than simply flipping the gender over and hoping that makes up for it.

Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel

#184

Post by orbifold »

andreasvc wrote: post #148
bostonpete wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should they have to give less direct feedback or make suggestions like that? To avoid hurting his feelings? To point him in the right direction so he knows what to do next? The author is a tenured university professor, not some high school student.

Why do you say less direct? The impression I get from the article is that none of the article actually gave a specific reason why the paper was not appropriate for the journal.

Because it is blindingly obvious that his paper had nothing even remotely connected to physics research in it.

Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel

#185

Post by ithkuil »

jckt wrote: post #90

Slightly off-topic, but normally HN is scientifically sound when physics or any other science is mentioned. But when it comes to time-travel/FTL, I can't help but feel that half the posters here seem to almost want it to be true. Or at least seem to think that all of our physics knowledge is worthless when it comes to FTL et al. Or is everyone just having a laugh?

You can implement "time travel" in the past by running a simulation of a portion of our universe and run it backward and then insert an avatar of yourself in the simulation and freak people out.

That opens up a discussion about the feasibility of such a simulation, but as far as time travel goes it wouldn't break any physical law (And yes, with that setting, you'd have plenty of other ways to freak people out other prescience)

Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel

#187

Post by PhasmaFelis »

grkvlt wrote: post #151
jckt wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't seem to find the claim in the post where the journal editors actually said "this can't be publishable, period". I am pretty sure that when the physics journal editor rejects your paper, she isn't even actually saying "this can't be published in a physics journal", she's really saying "this can't be published in this physics journal" (unless she says otherwise, explicitly, of course).

> she isn't even actually saying Why not go with "they aren't even actually saying" rather than the faux-affirmative-action sexism of using "she" there? This really grates with me, even more so when used with traditionally male-dominated roles, such as physicists or system administrators. Yes, you're freaking out the squares with your right-on craziness, but it's really rather childish. If you (100% rightly) want to…

Your trolling is transparent and uninspired. 2/10.

Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel

#188

Post by eruditely »

dameyawn wrote: post #168
suprgeek wrote: post #96

The "Real Paper investigating Time Travel" involved Searching the the Internet for two terms. The conclusion that these searches, even if they had been found, (which they were not) implied "time traveling Internet savvy people from the future searching for events in their past" is a staggering leap. Might as well theorize fairies from another dimension materialized into ours to poke fun at internet search analyzers.…

Is there any actual scientific substance to Occam's Razor?

The meaning has certainly been diluted over time.

Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel

#189

Post by mung »

privong wrote: post #127
kenjackson wrote: post #111

This paper makes a very fundamental mistake, IMO. If you were to time travel to the future and do a query, you wouldn't query about a past event. You'd query about a present event. For example, if time travel were created today, we wouldn't go back to 2000 and query about something that happened in 2001. We'd query about Lebron James or Obama. They should be looking for queries about technology/people/events that are…

I'm not sure it's a fundamental mistake. To make a counter-argument, if one travels back to some point in time, but can't remember (or don't know[0]) exactly when a major event happened, one might query it, to see if/when it has happened. Or one might query it because one is mistaken about when it happened. In either case, one might expect to see queries about things in advance of their occurrence. So while this part…

The iPhone 42s contains all the worlds knowledge past present and future and you just need to think about what you want to know and it will send it to you telepathically. Why on earth would I use something as archaic as Google search from the 21st century? Siri is a still humourless cow though.

Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel

#190

Post by facepalm »

andreasvc wrote: post #178
facepalm wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you explain it, though?

What is there to explain? They found nothing, which does not necessarily explain anything.

I mean how would you explain it if they would find something?

I guess this is another Bayesian vs classical statistics thing. In Bayesian thinking, absence of evidence is evidence (not proof, mind you, but it is information).

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